


A Heap of Broken Images

by hedda62



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 16:45:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She keeps searching, because finding is the only thing that will make her life worthwhile, even if she's no longer sure she will recognize the Grail when she sees it.</i>  (Vague spoilers through 2.22 "God Mode.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Heap of Broken Images

Across the dry lands the knight-errant claws her way, empty storm clouds looming above, and deep exhausted wells of the bluest of blue eyes opening below. Her throat is so parched she can no longer speak or swallow; her fingers curl like brittle talons; famine reigns in her heart. There seems little point to moving forward, but it's the only direction she understands any longer, and she likes to imagine herself crawling across his face, his body, digging in her nails: it gives her some satisfaction, even if the pain caused is insignificant compared to what he's used to. She knows it'll still hurt.

He feels too much. She recognizes the fatal flaw because it's her own, and because for both of them it's unexpected, the last failing anyone would suspect. She's honed and focused her emotion into a keen-edged blade, flashing out pure and clean from a concealed scabbard, catching sparks until it strikes home. His is diffuse, shadowed, suppressed; dusty and disheveled like a room gone untidied for years, like a book put aside one day and never picked up again. Like a fertile plain starved into desert. The land has no need for rain, he's declared; if only the toughest plants survive, it's enough.

It's a perfect landscape. Spare and uncompromising, with subtle gradations of color and terrain and breathtaking vistas, clear in the arid air down to the cactus spines, every centimeter his creation: it stuns her anew each day. Perfect, except that there's no place to hide. Though much is hidden in it.

She keeps searching, because finding is the only thing that will make her life worthwhile, even if she's no longer sure she will recognize the Grail when she sees it.

*

"It's an interesting choice of pseudonym," he says on the flight to Portland, after using "Ms. Groves" one too many times and watching her hand twitch toward the gun. "I mean, I know what you want to be with regard to the Machine. What you are, temporarily. But that's just it, isn't it? You never have put down roots. And if you're not rooted, you can't grow."

"I'm growing right now, Harold," she says, and that's how it feels, like bathing in nutrient solution, her shriveled green soul discovering the life it was meant to have.

"Mm. And I suppose I'm not one to talk." She sees it then, the pattern of a life: over and over, the tentative grasp of needy tissue at the soil of affection, torn away by violence. But he'd stayed in New York. There are plants that live in the canopy of the forest, clinging to trees, never touching the ground; she knows why she'd visualized him in the penthouse of a grand building, behind broad windows of safety glass, or behind arrow slits in a stone wall. Imagination is frivolous; it's also surprisingly useful.

"Grace is drawing you as we speak," she tells him, watching the life, the anger, flare in the blue eyes behind the glasses that aren't his. "We're collaborating on a lovely little fairy tale based on Arthurian legend. I persuaded her to make the wounded king a bird. Transformation myth: you know all about that. They're so fragile, birds. They break so easily." She doesn't need to gesture, to twist a neck or to snap a leg. He understands. "He lives in a castle overrun with ivy; did you know it climbs by rooting? Grace researches things like that. She's very thorough, very detail-oriented. Too bad the book will never be finished."

Harold's lips thin, but he can't seem to help opening his mouth. "Let me guess," he says. "The king has a knight he sends out on missions of mercy. A dog? Riding a horse, perhaps."

"Oh, Harold. You don't know the story, do you? He has no knights left. He's all alone, in the midst of the lands he's blasted to drought and destitution by his sins. There are knights trying to find him, yes, but it's not because of him; it's because of what he has. I suppose one of them could be a dog. I know you like dogs." She smiles at him, gently. "We'll call it Percival. John for short."

When she taunts him about Grace, he tries to strike out; when it's John, he stabs inward. It's fascinating to watch. "You don't think he's coming for you, do you?" she says. "You think he's lost faith. Or been distracted." She leans forward. "I believe in him, Harold. He'd follow you anywhere. But we're in the air and he's creeping across the desert. I'm afraid he's going to be too late."

*

Of course she's wrong. In the end, she's more Cinderella than Galahad, the dancing done and pumpkins squatting all around. One of them shoots her in the shoulder; she wants to say to Harold, _see, we're even more alike now,_ but she's in too much pain to speak, and he isn't looking at her anyway, couldn't hear her over the tumult of John, the rushing river of devotion echoing in the vast emptiness where the Machine is no longer. Her body will heal; Harold's never will. But his lands are fed and watered, the earth fertile and the streams swelling. He doesn't need to cast a hook; the fish leap into his arms.

"You cheated," she snarls at him over the noise of the helicopter, but she doesn't really mean it. He didn't hide anything; it was just that she didn't look far enough ahead, didn't climb high enough to see over the horizon. "I hate you," she adds, with even less truth. She hates that the Machine loves him. But she understands how it must feel. And she wants it to own all the feelings it has room for: love and hate and burning anger and the hunger of a pilgrim seeking home.

"I'll take care of you, Ms. Groves," he says. "You'll have a place to live. You'll have the help you need." There's only one cure for what ails her: the deeper communion, the Grail at her lips and not merely in her ear. But she can still hear the song of it, the resonance, the hum; she's looked into the heart of the light, golden and glowing, and she'll know it again.

*

Her keepers are under strict orders not to let her near a computer. So it's nothing to do with her when the scan of Grace's painting pops up on Harold's screen: the kingfisher in his castle tower; the armored shepherd dog below, waving a paw farewell; the vine twining up the stones, rooting itself as it climbs.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and a couple of phrases from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." I've had "that Harold-is-the-Fisher-King story" in the back of my head for months, but Root suddenly showed me how to do it. Thank you, Ms. Groves (a surprisingly arboreal name).


End file.
